About Me

This journal -- the antecedent to the blog -- gets its start from a
decision to dig up all the grass in our yard and plant flowers,
perennials, ground cover, shrubs, a small tree or two, berry bushes,
vegetables. My first title for it, I remember now, was "The Amateur." I
am fond of the word's Latin roots -- it means "lover." I'm not trained,
I'm not a professional, I just began digging things up and planting. To
be an amateur means to do something not for money, but for love. Five
summers later, I am still an amateur, but the place has blossomed. I
loved the development stage; now I'm working on management, maintenance
-- skills that require patience. I like doing things, trying things, and
seeing what happens. I experiment, I learn from experience (or try to).
I love to see things growing. I love the idea that when we step
outdoors, we are in nature. The "environment" begins at the doorstep.
Open the door; breathe the air; listen. Today a cardinal sat on the head
of a sunflower, bobbing and calling, looking for all the world as if he
had just lost something. I noticed he ate a few sunflower seeds too.
There is always something to see.Here's the "interests" list:

Sunday, June 14, 2015

The Poet among the Bohemians: The Garden of History.

Before the
counterculture, before hippies, before Beatniks, the social rebels who turned
their back on conventional society -- regular hours, regular jobs, family life,
the rules and respectability of the middle class -- were known as Bohemians.
The word was coined in Europe to describe the denizens of quarters given over
to students and non-students, from various lands who gathered in university
cities. They drank, caroused, witticized, rioted occasionally, had love
affairs, and some produced 'works' of various sorts. Some would no doubt give
up the wild-life to return to families or conventional occupations. Beginning
in the latter Middle Ages, collections of such folk gathered in university
towns like Bologne, then moved on to Paris. Some portion of the poor students
who flocked to take classes from famous lecturers hailed from the land of
Bohemia (now the Czech republic), somehow providing a name to the entire
population. Hence we
get "La Boehme," a romantic tale of artsy types who spent the occasional piece of good fortune at the cafe, fell in love (Act I), parted through
misunderstandings or jealousy (Act II), and perished romantically from
tuberculosis and poverty in Act III.

Published
last year, Justin Martin's "Rebel Souls," subtitled "Walt
Whitman and America's First Bohemians," traces the earliest seeds of an
urban counterculture in the self-consciously "unconventional"
gathering of artsy types, hard drinkers, publicity seekers, and other aspiring
escapees from the provinces at a special table in the basement cafe-restaurant-nightclub called "Pfaff's"
on Broadway in the mid-1850s.

Bohemianism
was brought to American, and to Pfaffs, by Henry Clapp, scion of a Puritan New
England family who goes to Paris a teetotaler and returns to America an
onephile who has learned how to live from the French and wants absolutely
nothing to do any more with the strictures of strait-laced Boston. Fast-growing,
melting-pot Manhattan proves more his style. He discovers the Broadway cafe run
by an easygoing, lager-loving Charlie Pfaff, one of the German immigrants who
in this period introduced lager beer, which in combination with refrigeration,
weaned Americans away from the room-temperature brews, ales and stouts favored
by their English ancestors.

Members of Clapp's "Bohemian Club" sat at his table, told stories, delivered complex toasts, tossed out
hidden and not so hidden insults to one another, grew witty, or high-spirited, or morose and sometimes offered critiques of others' productions.

Broadway,
as we learn from "Rebel Souls," was America's first urban playground
boulevard. Its hotels boasted indoor plumbing. It had scores of
theaters in the era when live entertainment was everything, from 'legitimate'
theater to minstrel shows in black-face. It had 'concert saloons' with scantily
clad waitresses. It had the department stores that coaxed Mary Todd Lincoln
into spending wildly beyond her $20,000 budget for a facelift at the White
House. Located near Bleeker Street, the city's newspaper row, Pfaff's lured a late-night newsie clientele along with the struggling artists and denizens of the Bleeker Street's cheap love nests
employed by bourgeoisie sinners.

The Bohemian maintstays of Clapp's
Bohemian Club illustrate some enduring types of the American demi-monde.
Fitz-James O'Brien: the talented writer who burns up his gift in alcoholic
fume. Thomas Nast,the pioneering newspaper cartoonist and satirist of political
boss-ism and corruption. The experimental drug explorer of inner worlds Fitz Hugh Ludlow,
who at age 21 published the scandalous best-seller "The Hasheesh
Eater," but never managed a second act. The brooding stage actor
Edwin Booth, son of a legendary American actor in the Booth family, "crazy" Junius
Brutus Booth (who pioneered the 'blood and thunder' school of acting) and brother to the infamous Southern sympathizer John Wilkes Booth.

The women
in the circle (in contrast to most establishments of the time women were welcome at
Pfaff's), included two 'celebrities,' actress-writer Ada Clare, and one of the first of America's international celebrities, "the wildest, most brazen and most colorful" of Bohemians,
Adah Isaacs Menken. Born of mixed race parentage she was teen
chorus girl and circus rider who reached stardom when a stage vehicle was
created for her, a bizarre theater piece set in an exotic setting in which Menken was tied to a horse lying on her
back in a sheer,
flesh-colored body stocking as he animal raced around a 'special effect' stage sets. In the dim lighting, Martin suggests, audiences could convince themselves she was
naked. "Menken's fearlessness was a plus," he writes. Famous for being the notorious "naked lady," her star burned bright and expired soon -- like the James Deans, Jim Morrisons and
Marilyn Monroes whose fame followed a similar trajectory. The other
superstar in the crowd was Artemus Ward (Charlie Brown), who toured internationally with a humorous lecture called "The Babes in the Wood." Dressed in old man's clothes with a mournful expression. He blended verbal faux pas, stricken silence, pregnant pauses and blurted nonsequitors while never getting around to the hypothetical "babes." Mark Twain close observed this act and
concluded "it was all in the pauses." The audience would laugh and Ward would look flustered, as if he
didn't understand why.A look of reproach: why is everyone
laughing? He practiced eveyr 'um' and 'ah,' timed his pauses, for a show that depended on an intense
rapport with the audience and his magnetic voice, clear as a bell throughout the auditorium.

One of the most original figures in "Rebel Souls," he invented
stand-up comedy.

Looking for
local star power, Clapp recruited Walt Whitman, who at age 39 had published his
great work "Leaves of Grass" three years before, the masterpiece that
would change the course of poetry, though it was little read at the time. While it sold few
copies, "Leaves" drew praise from Ralph Waldo Emerson. Clapp, a talented
editor, also founded a weekly journal that promoted Whitman's work relentlessly.

Though he
sometimes read a poem at the Bohemian Club, Whitman did not hold court or
exchange witticisms with the kind of people he called "the
talkers." Whitman wrote much, but spoke little -- "never a great
discusser" is his own self-characterization." My
greatest pleasure at Pfaff's was to look on -- to see, talk little, absorb,"
he wrote later. Whitman's type (like Ward's) is the one of a kind genius. Whitman
wrote, and largely invented, the style of free verse that still dominates Western poetry almost two hundred years later. His verse follows the voice rhythms
of natural speech. It's the music of ordinary speech spoken extraordinarily
well. He uses syntax, instead of rhyme, for closure and repetition. The verse swings,
relying on breath, parallelism, and the full range of vernacular expression. The content
of poetic discourse -- what Harold Bloom has lately termed 'the American sublime' --
was expanded by "Leaves of Grass" in a single step to the full range
of human of activity and sensation in lived experience.

Poems are
written from the point of view of an 'I' who is both the poet, and some
assumed persona, and then some-floating observer who switches character, and
even gender as needs be.

His book is
the "most democratic" work in the world, wrote Thoreau, who tellingly
objected to the frank sensuality of parts of it. Most 19th century Americans
did. Emerson recognized "Leaves" as the voice of an America that
could not be contained by the point of view of Concord and Boston or any single
perspective. "I am large...[as Whitman wrote in 'Leaves'] I contain multitudes."

And he
wanted to be loved as the poet who kept Americans together at a time when the
United States was flying apart. That didn't happen; none of it. His big book of
wholly new poems didn't sell. He was working once more as a newspaperman (the Brooklyn
Daily Times) when he began going to Pfaff's.

And he spent time in Pfaff's because its open, tolerant, atmosphere proved
inviting to another class people Whitman was attracted, beyond the intellectuals
who liked the sound of their own voices -- young, working class men who enjoyed
the company of other men.

"Rebel
Souls" centers on a period, and on a few major figures of that period,
when rapid urban development began to change the character of the
country. Urban expansion created a space for life styles that are common today,
but were new back then. Gatherings of artsy types, often with unconventional
personal lives, some seeking fame or attention, some merely seeking like-minded
companionship, are too routine today to believe that they ever needed to be
invented, pioneered anywhere. But they were, as "Rebel Souls" tells us -- at a basement beer hall on
Broadway in Lower Manhattan. Where else?